We now have copies of the Index pages (letters A-Z) of the Cook County Illinois Grants of Guardianship. The official name is Probate record - Grants of guardianship Book 1 1877-1884 Book 2 1884-1888. Below is an example of the Cook County Guardianship Record that is in the probate books and an example of the index page. If you need me to look up a name, please let me know.

This newspaper article
was written by our father, Thomas F. Driscoll, about a year before his
retirement after 46 years working as a journalist for the Peoria Journal
Star. He was obsessed with Anne Frank
and her story. All of his life, he
wanted to visit her home in Amsterdam, more than he wanted to visit Ireland,
the land of his ancestors. He got his
wish, wrote this story, and today is probably bugging her from above for a live
sit-down interview.

We have transcribed the newspaper article
exactly as it appeared in the paper on Sunday, June 3, 1990.

ReminderAt 263
Prinsengracht, Anne Frank makes certain the Holocaust will never be forgotten

Written by
Thomas F. Driscoll

Peoria
Journal Star, June 3, 1990

AMSTERDAM – It’s painful standing on the sidewalk outside of Anne Frank’s
home, knowing she used to play hopscotch there with her friends.

Across the street, the triangular park is still there, the place where
the kids used to turn cartwheels and do handstands, something Anne could never
master, much to her chagrin.

Around the corner is the same bookstore where her father bought the diary
with the red-and-white cover that he gave her for her 13th birthday,
the one in which she wrote her way to immortality.

A month after she got the diary, the family one morning in July, 1942,
walked the three miles in the rain to the secret Annex, where they hid for more
than two years until the Nazis – German and Dutch – found them and sent them
off to die. Eight people hid together in
the Annex, and the only one who survived Hitler’s death machine was Anne’s
father, Otto Frank. He was a German Army
officer in World War 1 who fled Germany with his family in 1933 when Hitler
took power and his hatred of Jews became public policy.

Something like half a million people now go through the tiny rooms of the
Secret Annex every year, trying to visualize what it was like for the eight
people to share the confinement and the fear for the 25 months. The eight had this in common: they all were Jews, and they were taking the
only option open to them to escape the concentration camps.

The Frank family – father Otto, mother Edith, older sister Margot and
younger sister Anne – went into hiding after Margot, who was 16, got a postcard
ordering her to appear for shipment to a Dutch work camp, which was the first
stop on the way to death. By the end of
World War II, something like 120,000 Dutch Jews had been killed by the Germans
for the crime of being Jewish. Only
about 25,000, Otto Frank being one of them, survived.

Anne Frank lives on as a symbol of the Nazi horror because she was a
gifted and prolific writer even though just a child. She kept a diary from the day of the family’s
confinement, when she was 13, until they were arrested when she was 15, not
knowing she was writing for posterity.

She didn’t just keep a diary but also wrote many stories and sketches
that were found in the hiding place after the police had gone. They demonstrate a remarkable talent for one
so young, but that is not what has given her writing its impact.

Her diary made the world see that Hitler’s victims were not just
incomprehensible statistics, such as six million Jews gassed, shot, tortured
and starved to death, but people with names, families, dreams – even little
children plucked out of school and sent away to be killed. Anne Frank left a record that personalized
the Holocaust. Her diary has sold more
than 20 million copies and been translated into 50 languages.

Walking through the Secret Annex is chilling. It would be more so, no doubt, to do it
alone, for in the never-ending line of visitors the sense of isolation and fear
get submerged.

The building, at 263 Prinsengracht, along one of Amsterdam’s many canals,
is a narrow structure four stories high.
It was the place where Mr. Frank ran his business, selling pectin for
jam and later spices of various kinds, and the Annex was an unused portion in
the rear.

To get to it, you climb narrow, steep stairways to the third level, go
down a long hallway, and there is the now-famous bookcase, hinged to the wall
and pulled aside to reveal the door to the hiding place. Go through it and you are in Mr. and Mrs.
Frank’s room, where Margot also slept, and where Anne’s room, which she had to
share with a dentist who went into hiding too.

Anne used to cut pictures of American movie stars from magazines and put
them on the wall of her room. They are
still there – Deanna Durbin, Jean Arthur, and all the others. She fantasized about becoming an actress and
wrote a short story about a girl she named Anne Franklin, who wrote to actress
Priscilla Lane, who invited her to Hollywood.
She went, but was disillusioned by life there and happily returned home.

Next to Anne’s room is the common washroom that they all shared, a sink
and a flush toilet, something they could never use except at night because not
all of the workers in the building knew of their presence.

Upstairs is the room of the Van Daan family, including their teenage son,
Peter, with whom Anne gradually fell in love.
Who else, after all, was there for her to fall in love with since none
of the eight people ever set foot outside of the Annex in two years and no
other children ever came in?

Outside the window of Anne’s room, the big horse chestnut tree that she
loved to watch as the seasons changed is still there, bigger than ever. A few doors up the Prinsengracht canal, the
church bell tolls in the Westerkerk – the same bell the prisoners listened to
day and night for all those months.

To the adults, the confinement was dreadful. Anne alone seemed able to make it into an
adventure, something to write stories about in the future. She wanted to write, she said, because “I
want to go on living even after my death,” never realizing that death was
imminent.

Most of the time in the Annex she was happy. One day, after being confined for a year and
a half, she wrote in her diary: “I
looked out of the open window, over a large piece of Amsterdam, over all the
roofs and on to the far distance, fading into purple. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may
live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot
be unhappy.”

Six months later, she and all the others were arrested, betrayed by
someone never identified for certain.
Six months after that, starving and in rags, Anne died of typhus in the
German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.
Margot died there too, a few days before Anne, in February or March,
1945, only a couple of weeks before the camp was liberated. Mrs. Van Daan died in one of the camps
too. Mrs. Frank died of starvation in
Auschwitz, where Mr. Van Daan was gassed. The dentist died in Neuengamme. Peter was among those marched from Auschwitz
by the SS when the Russians approached, and he died in Mauthausen on the very
day the camp was liberated by Americans.
Mr. Frank was freed from Auschwitz by Russian troops.

All eight of the prisoners had left Holland on the last train that took
Jews to Auschwitz. Two months after Margot
and Anne Frank died, the war ended and the Netherlands was free again.

Amsterdam, or rather the Anne Frank Foundation, has done a good job keeping
the Secret Annex available to tourists without letting it become tawdry. Located in the center of the city, it is easy
to find and to get to – and profoundly moving.

There is nothing in Amsterdam, however, to mark where the Frank family
lived before abandoning the apartment and entering the Annex. Their home was at 37 Merwedeplein, which is a
V-shaped street around two sides of a triangular park on the south side of
Amsterdam. No plaque or statue or any
kind of memento exists there, but the apartment building looks largely the same
as it did when the Franks lived there on the third floor (known as the second
floor in Amsterdam, where the ground floor is not counted as the first).

Because it has not been made into a tourist attraction, it is a more
profitable place to go, to sit on a bench in solitude in the park where Anne
and her friends used to play, and meditate on how all these unspeakable crimes
could have happened, even to children, in the lifetimes of many of us.

And to wonder whether it could happen again – in what
we like to refer to as western civilization.

____________________________________________

Thomas Driscoll is executive editor of the Journal
Star. He was in Amsterdam last month.

All family mysteries are interesting to me, but it is always
the Early Adoption stories that grab my attention and send me on an unexpected
journey. I call them “Early Adoptions”
because they took place long after the Adoptee has passed away, and require
creative legwork to figure out where to look since the records are old and laws
may not have been in existence. These Early Adoptions are muddied by the fact that courthouses burned or flooded,
family stories handed down are manipulated to hide the truth, laws were not
passed yet requiring a paper trail, and basically people were too ashamed to
talk about it.

Heartbreaking for sure.
But all mysteries can be solved.

Here are some of our most interesting adoption cases that we
have worked on to date:

1. Giulia was an Italian woman born
about 1878 and the family believed she was adopted in Chicago Illinois after
escaping Italy due to a fear for her life.
After researching her family, I discovered that Giulia was born in
Calvello Italy. I had the good luck of
finding the online birth records for this small town, but they were written in
Italian, not English. I don’t speak
Italian. So I literally went thru the
records by hand looking for 3 names that I could read = the name Giulia or her
adopted parent’s Rosaria and Nicolai. I
still cannot believe what I stumbled across.
After spending an entire day flipping thru about 5 years of births, I
found a record at the back of the book where special cases were written about.

Note the name on the left says Giulia. The top row on the right shows the name
Rosaria. I had a translator in Italy read
the document and tell me the following:

This is the birth record (#14) for Giulia
Agrifoglio

Rosaria, a 23 year old seamstress, is not
declaring that she is the mother, but that she found the infant. She presents
the infant to the official who gives the infant the name Giulia, and the
surname [cognome] Agrifoglio. This was usually a "made-up" name and
not found in the town.

I believe Rosaria requested that the child be
left in her care.No mother or father is identified... that
is why you see "Esposita" under Giulia's name in the left column
where you would normally see the parents' names.

It is an amazing
discovery but unfortunately one that probably means the family will never know
who her real parents are.

2. An infant named Nellie was adopted in Indiana
around 1885. She supposedly searched a
few times in her life to find her birth family but with no luck. 128 years later, her great granddaughter took
it upon herself to try to research the birth, but also hit a brick wall. So she contacted us for help. After spending several frustrating hours
without finding any records, I searched for and found an orphanage in the town
where the family lived. There it was,
Nellie’s record of being taken home by her adopted father, and it named the
birth mother and birth grandmother who had dropped her off.

3. A baby named Joseph was born out of wedlock in
Boston around 1924. We were lucky enough
to know the birth mother’s name, but the family could not figure out where she
was after the birth. I was able to
locate a simple obituary for Joseph’s birth grandfather, which named the birth
mother and her new married name. All the
pieces fell together and we located 11 living cousins for the family to reach
out to.

4. One of my most interesting and frustrating
cases was a son who told me the story about his mother being switched at birth
in Quebec around 1929. She was told the
harrowing story after her “adopted” father passed away, and the details were
that her real birth parents were unmarried from the United States. On the same day of her birth, in the same
hospital, a son was born to the adopted parents but died because he was a
hemophiliac. The doctor agreed to switch
the babies and no records existed. My
research uncovered her baptism to the adopted parents that raised her in
Quebec, but no death record of the hemophiliac son. To date, we do not know who the real parents
are.

5. This month, we just helped a woman in
Minnesota figure out the real birth father of her Irish great grandfather James. Her brick wall was based on a family story
that James was told upon his mother’s death that the father he grew up with was
not his birth father. In fact, James’
mother was previously married, gave the first 2 sons away who died in the Great
Chicago Fire of 1871, and kept baby James before getting remarried. With only this story to go on, we scoured through
the local courthouse and Catholic Church, and found a vital record entry of her
2nd marriage noting her name as Mrs.
That told us she was a widow. The
client immediately found his death record in the 1870 US Federal Census Mortality
Schedules of 1870. We have not found
what happened to the other 2 children born to this couple and even researched
local Guardianship records in the County Courthouse. Sadly it appears the story may be true. Our next step is to research the cemeteries
in Chicago for a burial record since a certificate of death was not found for
either son.

6. Then there is our own family story where my
father found out his mother was adopted on the night she passed away. After spending an entire year digging through Cook
County courthouse records, I found the birth mother had actually taken my grandmother
home for the first year in 1900, gave her to the “adopted” father in 1901, and
would occasionally visit her in Chicago until she moved away before 1910. By 1911, she agreed to let the official
adoption take place, and then remarried the next month. She died in Twin Falls Idaho. But the most amazing part was the whispers
that the adopted father was actually the birth father. So we found a living descendant of his
sister, and she agreed to take a DNA test.
It came back as a strong 3rd cousin, confirming that he was
actually the real father but had to adopt her because he was not listed on the
birth certificate. Thank God for DNA. Read the full story at the link below:

7. Today, we have taken on an adoption case that
takes us back to Nova Scotia Canada. It will be
very difficult to research foreign records from the 1880’s but we are ready for
the challenge. Fingers crossed for
success.

Ancestry Sisters has started a new Facebook page called Adoption Genealogy. This is a community to help answer questions on how and where to research your family's mysteries related to Early Adoptions, Orphanages, and Guardianships. Follow us, LIKE our page and ask questions on the link below.

Chicago has such a rich history, and is so ethnically diverse,
that it just begs you to search all the various goldmines around the city for
clues to solving your family mysteries. Immigrants
flooded the city in the mid to late 1800’s, which helped to shape the Chicago
that we know and love today. Your ancestors could have helped build the
railroads, rebuild the city after the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, and design and
build the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, also known as the White City.

There is a lot to learn about Chicago Genealogy and what is available
to research, but here are some of my favorite resources and what they can tell
you:

Chicago Vital Records – After 1871,
vital records are available and fairly easy to research. The challenge is that birth, death and
marriage records before 1900 do not name parents. But other clues can be gathered, including
where the person lived on a birth or death certificate, or whether the person
was married in a church or by the Justice of the Peace. And
the Illinois index of early marriages and deaths is a great resource,
especially for finding misspelled names.

Church Records – While the Great
Chicago Fire destroyed all vital records before 1871, Church Records help to
fill in those early blanks and can take you back as early as 1850. Certain Catholic Churches even kept records
that identified where the person was born and when. This is especially true in the Italian and
Polish ethnic churches.

Cemetery Records – Not only can
you find the date of death, but headstones can include place of birth, year of
birth and if lucky, where they were born.
You can also see who they are buried with, or near, for major clues. Don’t just rely on Find a Grave. Go visit the cemetery in person. One of my favorite stories is how I began to
research the Catholic Cemetery of Calvary in Evanston. I started out by pulling the cemetery record
of my Irish Great Great Grandmother.
What I uncovered was a burial plot with 8 people in the same grave. Then it spiraled out of control - who were
these people buried with my Julia who died in 1884? Over a period of about a year, I bet I went
back to this cemetery 25 times, becoming fast friends with the office manager. But my biggest discovery was finding my 3x
Great Grandfather from Quebec who was buried in the same plot with his grandson.
I had no idea he even came to the US and
never thought to search vital records for him.
Without searching for his grandson’s cemetery record, I would have never
found him in Chicago.

Voter Registrations of 1888, 1890 and
1892 – These records identify the courthouse where the person was
naturalized, how long the person lived in Chicago, how long they lived in
Illinois, and their current address. It
is often in alphabetical order by last name so it can help you see other
potential family members. This is a
great replacement for the destroyed 1890 Federal Census.

City Directories & Telephone
Directories – Published books began around 1839 and help you plot the
areas where your family lived, and when they moved. These addresses help you define nearby
relatives and what churches they may have attended.

Ward Maps – The city was
constantly changing its street names and ward boundaries. It’s important to identify where your
ancestors lived, but that can also be a challenge. Sometimes they lived in the same house on
multiple census records, but the street names are different. Ward maps can help you figure out these
changes.

Census Records – Chicago census
records show the street a person lived on starting in the 1880 census.

Naturalization Records – There
are 3 places where an individual could have been naturalized in Cook
County: Circuit Court, Superior Court
and District Court. The first 2 are
found at the Daley Center, while the District Court filings are found at the
NARA Great Lakes Region.

Immigration – the Newberry
Library houses many books on ethnic immigration that has an index of names,
making it easier to find often misspelled names.

NARA Great Lakes Region – This repository
houses the District Court Naturalization records of Illinois, Indiana,
Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, along with many other court records.

Divorce Records – While records
are off-site, once you find an index of a divorce, the record is a goldmine for
information. The divorce of my adopted
Grandmother’s birth mother led to naming her sister as a witness in the
trial. That led to helping me find where
the birth mother ended up dying, and ultimately where she was born.

Probates – Again, these records
are kept off-site. If an index is found
for that person, then it takes up to 2 weeks for them to arrive for viewing.

Land Records – Did your ancestors
own the property they were living in and for how long? That can be found by researching land
records.

Adoptions, Orphanages and Guardianships
– There are various ways to research this difficult area of your tree. Illinois adoptee birth records prior to 1946 can now be obtained
by family. Also, Catholic
Charities can be helpful in finding records at a Catholic Orphanage. Guardianship Records in Cook County can be
viewed on microfilm, and census records can be combed for children living at
local orphanages.

Autopsy Records – These records
don’t necessarily lead to family clues, but are interesting and help shape the
stories of a person’s life.

Newspaper Obituaries – The challenge
with early obituaries in Chicago is that the city had so many people dying on
any given day, that the obits were just kept to the basics. Unless the person was of prominence or had an
interesting life story, the most you can get from them are maiden names,
children, if the person was single or married, along with what church they
attended and where the burial will take place.
On a few obituaries, it will tell you what country they were born, but
that is rare.

Libraries – Several key
libraries are essential to finding nuggets of Genealogy information: Newberry Library, Harold Washington Library,
Family History Library, and Northeastern Illinois University Library

If any of your ancestors lived in Chicago, or even had a
brief stay in this great city, then I strongly encourage you research them
immediately. My simple advice is to
never give up until you exhaust all avenues available to you. Based on my years of experience in Chicago,
it can be an expansive yet rewarding search.

My
maternal grandmother was a wonderful Christian woman born October 1, 1900, in
Fulton, Illinois. She played her churches organ every Sunday for more than
thirty five years. She told me a sad story she thought was true: her mother,
Ethel Lynn, died during her birth. This caused her great
pain and worse, she believed that her father apparently could
not care for five children with one a newborn. She was told that he moved them
to York, Nebraska, then asked the County of York to assume guardianship of them
in about 1905. My grandmother passed away in 1994, but she got to meet her one sister after a separation of seventy-one
years. Her three brothers had all died before she found out who they were
from a family descendant in 1984. She died believing that her birth caused the death of her mother and
the wardship and separation of her and all four of her siblings, a sister
and three brothers, by York County because her father could not raise five
children. I retained Ancestry Sisters to investigate the facts because they
sounded odd to me. It was discovered that her mother, Ethel, became ill with
“consumption” a full five months after my grandmother was born and died on 3
July 1901, nearly a full nine months after
her birth and five months after becoming ill. Her mother’s death was unrelated to her birth. Her father had
moved to Clinton, Iowa, across the Mississippi River from Fulton, IL, and
Ethel’s sister, Elisabeth, and Elisabeth’s husband, George, assumed
their guardianship in July 1902. In May 1904 the York County, Nebraska, Court
ordered the adoption of my four year old grandmother by the couple whom she
always knew as her loving parents, Charles B. and Ella Mae of York,
Nebraska. A professionally authored and persuasive letter prepared by Ancestry
Sisters persuaded the York County Court to release the adoption record (which
is routinely a sealed document). The factual revelations Ancestry Sisters
discovered gave me the true story
behind my grandmother’s past, one quite
different from the one she died believing. I just wish I had acted before
that wonderful Christian woman passed away.

Ellen Heffernan is my great great grandmother. That much I know for sure. But beyond that, I cannot figure out a single
thing about her life in Ireland, including her parents, siblings, and where in Ireland she
was born.

It has been a frustrating bunch of years trying to write her
life story. I tire of using the phrase
Brick Wall. Quite frankly, she is not a
brick, nor a wall. She is my Direct Ancestor,
whom I share her name.

So thus, I am sharing my research to date, and asking for
suggestions and ideas for what I have missed and where I go next. I am thinking that I am too close to her
story and am missing a clue.

Her death certificate says she was born May, 1829 in
Ireland. No parents were listed. Figures.

Her obituary says she came to the US at the age of 14 with
her parents, but they failed to name her parents (grrrrr). This puts her immigration around 1843. An Immigration Record has not been found
because it was a few years before the great migration, and records are
sparse. Also, there are many Ellen
Heffernan’s coming to the US in the 1840’s.
Who knew……..

Now I know her parents came to America with her. But where they are is a mystery as well.

Ellen married John O’Connor sometime around 1851 and they
lived in Seymour, Connecticut.

I cannot for the life of me find Ellen in the 1850 census. I found John in Chicopee, Massachusetts as a
single man with his sister and 4 brothers, but Ellen does not appear to be
living in that area.

No marriage record has been found. I went thru the Chicopee town records by
hand, and the Catholic Church records in Connecticut, but nothing.

Her first born baby was a girl named Bridget born in Seymour
Connecticut and baptized at St. Mary’s Derby, CT. Ellen and John clearly followed the traditional
naming patterns of the Irish, so I am 100% confident that this is her mother’s
name. However, her father’s name is
unclear. Their first born son was David,
and that is John’s father. Second born
son was named John, which usually the 3rd born son is named after
the baby’s father, and 2nd born after the Mother’s father. So was baby John named after the father, or
Ellen’s father, or both? Or was there a
baby that died at birth? Based on the
fact that she had a baby almost every year, there is a window where another son
could have been born.

There was another Heffernan living in Seymour, Connecticut. His name was Patrick Heffernan and I did find
his marriage record in 1855 at the approximate age of 37. Ellen is not a witness to the marriage. She does not appear to be a sponsor to any of
Patrick’s children. However, there is a
Patrick Halloren as a witness to baby John.
Was this a misspelling for Heffernan?
Patrick’s marriage record at the Derby Courthouse says he was born in
Limerick. I doubt this was his first
marriage but I cannot connect the dots to another one.

There is an Ann Heffernan living as a servant in Seymour,
Connecticut in the 1850 census. At
first, I thought this was Ellen, thinking the census taker misunderstood her
when she spoke her name. That is until I
found the marriage of Ann Heffernan and James Plunkett in 1851. Is Ann a sister? Ann goes missing along with her husband and
son after the 1860 census.

Ellen spent up to 40 years in the Connecticut Valley
Hospital from 1873 to her death in 1916.
Now you see why I am obsessed with figuring out her life?? Diagnosis
was melancholy from having too many babies (at least 12 that I know of). The hospital exists today and they sent me
her medical records from 1873 – 1886, but no clues help define her past other
than her condition was hereditary. Gee
thanks, that’s helpful.

Baby Bridget’s sponsors were Michael Heffernan and Mary
Gannon. I am confident these are
siblings. Mary Gannon has been elusive
to find. As for Michael, would you
believe there were 2 Michael Heffernan’s that died in Derby CT. One in 1899 and the other in 1900. The first died as a pauper in a poor house,
having lost his wife, child and house, and father was listed as Michael
Heffernan on the D/C. The 2nd
died as a widow, before the 1900 census was taken, but father was listed as
James Heffernan, and James is buried in the same cemetery as his son. I tend to think her brother was the first one
that died as a pauper. His obit says he
had a sister Bridget Heffernan who lived in New Haven. Ellen wasn’t listed, but then Ellen had been
in the hospital for over 20 years at this point. Were they embarrassed to name her, or had
they forgotten about her? God I hate
this journey at this point.

James Heffernan, father of Michael Heffernan, has the parish
of Glenroe County Limerick on his headstone. But guess
what? Church records for Glenroe don’t
start until 1850. I even visited the
church on my trip to Ireland in 2012, but there wasn’t a single Heffernan
Headstone at the Glenroe cemetery. I
still wonder about Glenroe, because it is all of 15 miles from where John O’Connor
was born.

Ellen’s last baby was born in 1874, the year after she was
admitted to the hospital for the first time and then sent home 2 months
later. Margaret O’Connor was raised by
her sisters (including my great grandmother) since her mother was in the
hospital for her entire childhood. I
have a picture of Margaret and now have a very clear understanding of where my
blue gray eyes with the dark rim around the iris came from. I have the eyes of either a Heffernan or O’Connor.

The Heffernan name is misspelled in so many ways – Hefron,
Hefen, Hefferen, etc. Online searching
is a nightmare

No Land Records or a Will were found at the courthouse.

Ellen is buried at the Catholic Cemetery in Seymour, but no
headstone or location of burial plot was found.
No burial card, nothing. The
cemetery caretaker told me that the Irish were discriminated against at that
time, and even the priest wasn’t interested in keeping proper records. Sigh.

I have a subscription to Find My Past. They have a large database of Irish birth records
in Limerick. In looking for any Ellen
Heffernan’s born to a mother named Bridget around May, 1829, there are a couple
of options. But none of the father’s listed
were either John, Michael or James. Another
lovely needle in a haystack.

In conclusion, I still think my biggest clues
are as follows:

She was born in the month of May

Her mother was named Bridget

Possible siblings include Bridget,
Ann, Mary, Patrick and Michael

Patrick Heffernan says he was from County Limerick

My plan is to go back thru the Connecticut Catholic
Church records one more time next year, and look at every entry from 1850 thru
1880 in 3 local churches. I will look at
misspelled names, sponsors of every baby born, and witnesses at every marriage to
see if Ellen’s name is listed.

Beyond that, I am out of ideas. But I cannot quit and will never stop
thinking about her. So offer up any
ideas and suggestions on where you think I have missed a clue.

I have prizes, awards, and a lifetime of
accolades for the person the can help me figure this out.